Life on Earth may have begun with a splash of TNA – a different kind of genetic material altogether. Because RNA can do many things at once, those studying the origins of life have long thought that it was the first genetic material. But the discovery that a chemical relative called TNA can perform one of RNA's defining functions calls this into question. Instead, the very first forms of life may have used a mix of genetic materials.

Today, most life bar some viruses uses DNA to store information, and RNA to execute the instructions encoded by that DNA. A key piece of evidence for this "RNA world" hypothesis is that RNA is a jack of all trades. Now it seems TNA might have been just as capable, although it is not found in nature today. It differs from RNA and DNA in its sugar backbone: TNA uses threose where RNA uses ribose and DNA deoxyribose. The team took a library of TNAs and evolved them in the presence of a protein. No TNA world. New Scientist: It's not all about you DNA...
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Green Glow Shows RNA Editing in Real Time. Glowing genes: White arrows show hot spots of ADAR activation; courtesy of Reenan Lab/Brown University It’s a long way from gene to protein.

The dogmatic scenario is: DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into protein. But in real life, and in real living things, the workings aren’t quite that simple. One example: individual units of RNA sometimes need to be converted, in what’s called RNA editing, into related entities for the ultimate formation of the right proteins. An enzyme called ADAR (adenosine deaminase, RNA-specific) is responsible for a specific such alteration important for good nervous system function. Now researchers have devised a technique for seeing this particular RNA editing process in real time—the corrected strand gives off a green glow—and even for the restoration of functionality.
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Vivian Cheung of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia says that her team stands by a May paper in which it reported that it had found more than ten thousand sites where transcribed RNA differed from an individual’s corresponding DNA sequence. The paper raised the possibility of an as-yet unknown mechanism that performs a new form of “RNA editing” in our cells. Cheung also says that new data from her own group and from others (PDF) supports the finding. “We stand by our report that there are many sites in the human genome where RNA sequences differ from their corresponding DNA sequences, and the types of RNA-DNA differences (RDDs) are not restricted to the known A-to-G and C-to-U RNA editing events,” Cheung wrote in an email. Cheung’s defense comes after Daniel R. But Chueng writes that “the evidence presented by Schrider and colleagues are not rigorous.”

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RNA editing may not be as widespread as claimed. A paper that appeared to find evidence for a new mechanism of genetic regulation has been challenged by an analysis released today.

In May, a team led by Vivian Cheung of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia reported that in an analysis of 27 people, it had found 10,210 sites where transcribed RNA differed from an individual’s corresponding DNA sequence. The finding was startling because it implied that there might be an as-yet undiscovered mechanism of ‘RNA editing’ that could disrupt the central dogma, the process whereby DNA is faithfully transcribed into matching sequences of RNA, which are translated into proteins. But other researchers pointed out that Cheung’s team had not performed some crucial analyses to ensure that it was actually observing mismatches rather than genetic sequencing errors or accurately transcribed regions of DNA. Today, Daniel R.

Schrider, Jean-Francois Gout and Matthew W. Hahn says his team did contact Cheung’s group, but did not receive a reply.
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